Harry smiled the way a poker player smiles when he’s caught bluffing. “Fair enough, Mr. Bailey,” he said, turning back toward the street. “You’re a man who knows his civil rights. Thank you for your time.” As he stepped onto the street, he heard the front door to the house open.
“Mr. Bailey!” he called out, wheeling around again.
Mark turned in the open doorway, leaning against the jamb. “Yeah?”
“You said a car fell on your hand. Where did that happen?” “Right at the end of my arm.” Mark disappeared inside the house, and the door closed behind him.
Alone again in his car, Harry considered Mark’s last flippant remark in the context of their entire discussion. He looked nervous as hell until he started talking about Nathan. Then he got cocky and talkative. When the subject of his injury came up, he got nervous again.
Harry turned his head to face the house and the Bronco in the driveway. Had to hurt like hell to have a vehicle that size fall on your hand.
Wait a minute! There’s only one car here! If it fell off its blocks, who put it back together for him to drive to the hospital?
No doubt about it, Mark Bailey was guilty of something. Whatever it was, it had something to do with his injury.
Harry checked his watch again, and was relieved to see he still had three and a half hours left in his career. He thought he’d spend part of it down at the hospital. Maybe one of the ER docs would know something helpful.
Michaels was the first investigator to arrive at the Nicholsons’ house, just behind the satellite van from a local television station.
My, but word travels fast, he thought. Neighbors and assorted onlookers—children and their mothers, mostly—had begun to gather in tight clumps in the street, drawn to the scene either by word of mouth or by the presence of the barricade tape whose sole purpose, ironically, was to keep people away.
According to the dispatcher, officers were originally sent to the house in response to a burglary call, but when they arrived on the scene, they radioed back for a senior presence.
As Warren approached the front door, he recognized a familiar face from the first night at the JDC. “Good afternoon, Officer Borsuch,” he said as he approached. “Got you working days now?”
The cop guarding the door looked proud that he’d been recognized. “Nah,” he said with a smile. “Workin’ double shift. I need the money. Tryin’ to buy a boat.”
Warren clapped him on the shoulder. “Boat, huh? Haven’t you heard that there’s only two happy days in a boat owner’s life?” “What’s that?”
“The day he buys it and the day he sells it.”
Officer Borsuch had heard the saying a hundred times but laughed anyway as he stepped aside to usher Michaels through the front door into the enormous foyer. “Quite a place, huh?”
“I’ll say,” Warren agreed. “So, what makes you think the Bailey kid was here?”
“Well, I wish I could say it was brilliant detective work, Lieutenant,” Borsuch said good-naturedly as he led Michaels down the main hallway. “But it really was pretty easy.” He pulled open the door to the bathroom to display the pile of bloody clothes left where Nathan had dropped them.
Warren laughed. “I guess there are different levels of deductive reasoning, aren’t there? Did he take anything?”
“Yes, sir. He took some clothes belonging to one of the Nicholson kids, ate a bunch of their food, and drove off with their BMW.”
Warren’s eyebrows arched high on his forehead. “BMW, huh? Kid’s got good taste. Didn’t even think about him driving out of town. How do you suppose he got through the roadblocks?” he wondered aloud.
“There’s also this,” Borsuch said, handing over a piece of lined notebook paper. The writing was done in the studied cursive of a child’s hand.
“He left a note?” Warren asked, incredulous. It took him less than fifteen seconds to read it. “I’ll be damned,” he said when he was finished. “Are we sure this isn’t some red herring? Have we checked the facts?”
Borsuch nodded. “From what we can tell so far, he’s telling the truth. The most polite burglar in history.”
Warren read the note through again and shook his head. “Where’s the family?” he asked, looking up.
Borsuch gestured out to the yard, through the front door.
“Looks to me like they’re getting their fifteen minutes of fame.”
Warren’s eyes followed Borsuch’s arm. The random mingling of people by the curb had metamorphosed into press conference. Two more TV vans had arrived since Michaels had arrived on the scene, their transmitters elevated high into the air, ready to start beaming signals. Four people, two adults and two children, stood at the curb, their backs to the house. The press faced them, camera lenses glinting in the sun and handheld boom mikes dangling in the air like so many branches of a willow tree.
“The way this case is shaping up in the press,” Warren said, “I think the Nicholsons ought to get used to being on television.”
As he pulled his patrol car into one of the slots reserved for police officers, Harry Thompkins noted that the hospital parking lot was relatively empty. With luck, that meant he’d be able to talk to somebody right away.
He took the short cut through the ambulance entrance, smiling politely to the triage nurse as he walked past her station and entered the Emergency Department. He was right. Only about half the beds were full, mostly with older people who looked to Harry’s untrained eye like they needed a general practitioner more than they needed an emergency room.
He stopped at the trauma desk, where a frighteningly young physician’s assistant was filling out some paperwork.
“Excuse me,” Harry interrupted.
The youngster held up a finger and finished the paragraph he was writing. Finally, he looked up. “Can I help you?”
“Yes, you can. I need to speak to the doctor who treated a patient named Mark Bailey yesterday.”
“Is he in trouble?” The PA’s enthusiasm made him look even younger.
“Don’t know yet. That’s why I need to talk to the doc.”
The PA looked to the ceiling as he searched his memory. You could almost see the cartoon lightbulb go on over his head. “Hand injury, right?”
Harry couldn’t help but smile at the kid’s enthusiasm. “Yeah, right. Hand injury.”
“That would be Dr. Baker.”
“Tad Baker?”
“You know him?”
Harry shrugged. “Everybody knows Dr. Tad. Us cops bring you a ton of business, you know. Plus Tad and I played each other in a tennis tournament a couple months ago.”
“Who won?”
“Don’t ask,” Harry said and he turned away from the desk.
Tad was in the far corner, putting stitches into the back of a patient’s head.
“Afternoon, Dr. Tad,” Harry said as he approached.
Tad looked up from his work and smiled. “Well, if it isn’t Braddock County’s finest.” The patient—a teenage boy clad in swim trunks—tried to raise his head to see, but was gently kept in place by Tad’s gloved hand. “Jeeze, Harry, I’m sorry, all the doughnuts are gone.
Harry flipped him off.
“What brings you to the Band-Aid barn?” Tad inquired, returning his eyes to his work.
“Got some questions to ask you.”
“Official business?”
“Yep.”
“All right, then, let me just finish up my needlepoint on Tyler here, and I’ll be right with you.”
“Mind if I watch?” Harry asked. Unlike so many of his colleagues who could not stomach hospital scenes, Harry was fascinated by medical procedures. Maybe they’ll hire me here after Michaels fires me this afternoon, he thought.
“Not my call,” Tad said. “It’s really up to my patient here. Tyler, do you mind if my friend Harry watches me put you back together?”
“Who is he?” Tyler asked, not trying a second time to see for himself.